Participatory Institutions and Political Ideologies: How and Why They Matter?

The role played by ideological preferences in the development of participatory institutions has not been a central issue in the democratic innovations field. Politics is messy and does not fit easily into the ideals of deliberative democrats. However, the question is central if we aim to understand where do these institutions come from and what they could realistically achieve. Do different political ideologies develop more/less or different participatory processes? Our starting point was the assumption that different views on the core values of democracy would lead to different positions concerning the role and expected benefits of citizen participation.

The paper makes a summary of a participatory program developed during 2020-24, with funding from Spanish research funds. The main goal of the paper is to establish a critical dialogue among the different papers and analysis produced (concerning mostly but not only the Spanish case), as well as with other comparative research on the topic. As such, the empirical materials will be two datasets about local participation policies from two different periods, case studies, as well as other comparative materials (metanalysis and OCDE Minipublics dataset).

The paper will develop the main learnings of the project: differences at a specific time point between left and right wing municipalities are limited; these differences increase somewhat with radical left municipalities and for some more politicized forms of participation; party effects are more visible in the mid-long term (as the literature on other policies has shown); and this effect develops partly as a result of building participatory infrastructures (human resources and strategic plans) that create some path dependency into participation policies.